1 week, 2 versions of reality

As if Hurricane Sandy weren’t doing enough to muddle the presidential race a week before the election, the two campaigns now seem to be embracing two sharply different versions of political reality.

The Mitt Romney narrative: The electoral map is expanding and we are on the march. Minnesota and Pennsylvania — blue states that neither campaign had been paying attention to — are tightening and if such patterns hold up, we could win a smashing victory with over 300 electoral votes.

The Barack Obama side: There they go again. This is 2008 in replay mode, when John McCain had no path to 270 electoral votes and made a desperate gambit to try and put Pennsylvania in play. Romney needs to project Big Mo to paper over his struggles in the core battleground states. Nice head fake Mitt — but we don’t buy it.

Which side is blowing smoke? The truth of the matter rests, as it usually does, somewhere in the middle.

In the post-FEC limits era, when both candidates are free to raise and spend freely, money is not the object it has always been in campaigns. So with the dollars flowing in, Romney’s high command can take a look at single-digit deficits in states like Minnesota and Pennsylvania and lay down some cash on TV there, as they have in recent days. The best-case scenario is that you goose the polling a little more and, if the wind blows heavily in your direction during the campaign’s final days, you pull out a narrow win in one or both of these traditionally Democratic states. The worst-case scenario is that you’ve burned a few bucks you could afford to lose in a state you didn’t need and made Obama drop his own cash in service of creating the perception that Democrats are on the defensive.

“It’s like buying a cheap lotto ticket with a little extra money,” explained longtime GOP strategist Mike Murphy. “Their day job is still, ‘How do we win Virginia and Ohio and get one more?’”

And the fact that Romney went up on Pennsylvania TV so triumphantly, issuing a press release entitled “Ever Expanding Map: PA,” suggests that his campaign wants the idea that they’re competing there broadcast as much as they actually want to compete there.

“It’d be one thing to take a quiet flyer,” said senior Obama adviser David Plouffe. “But they are playing it up, just like McCain in 2008.”